> Hopefully James P. will be along shortly to
> give his account of this weekend's efforts!
Friday, Saturday and Sunday this past weekend was our so-called Spring Track Meet. The task was to ballast and tamp the new quarter-mile of track put down last fall, so that we'd be able to run passenger trains to Alna Center, our destination for the last five years.
Thanks to the help of a rented air compressor and four jitterbug tampers (two borrowed), plus a few dozen volunteers, we started Friday working north to south so that the tampers wouldn't have to move out of the way every time the ballast train arrived (a problem from spring last year which limited the number of feet we put into service).
Things went much better than I expected. We used up all the stone (180 cubic yards worth) shovelling off the single flatcar by hand. About 150-ish feet of the new track had been ballasted last year, so started from that point. The tamping crews kept right up with the ballast crews.
Unfortunately we ran out of stone 60 feet short where the old ballast ends, because of some significant dips that we had to remove further north. Extra stone was ordered Friday night but a driver couldn't be found to deliver it to us.
The tamper crews returned north mid-Sunday and finished off the area around Alna Center Station (which now has footings for the station in the ground).
WW&F Railway Museum
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